2012 Distribution Grant for New York State Artists recipients announced

Feb 17, 2012 4:53 pm • admin

The Distribution Grant for New York State Artists, a regrant program for the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film, provides support for the distribution of new works in film, video, sound, new-media, and media-installation. Grant awards assist artists in making recently completed works available to public audiences and may include, but are not limited to distribution and exhibition expenses such as: duplication of preview, screening, and exhibition copies; promotional materials including documentation and schematics of media-installation and new-media works. Successful grantees are awarded the opportunity to work with a project mentor who will offer guidance as grantees execute their distribution and exhibition plans. The following eight projects were selected during a competitive panel review process:

2012 Grantees:
(alphabetical by artist)

David Dixon, David Dixon is dead.

David Dixon is dead. is a documentary of past events and of events that have yet to come. It is fiction, but a fiction built solidly on the real-life public declaration by its maker, David Dixon, which states that after his death, his head should be removed from his body and cleaned to the skull, the skull then included in an art piece. Distribution funds will support the packaging of David Dixon is dead. including supporting materials, and a tour with the live commentary performance.

Meredith Drum, Louisiana Re-storied

Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation focused on environmental justice issues in small communities along the stretch of Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans – communities uncomfortably sandwiched between large petrochemical plants and oil refineries. The piece demonstrates how, in recent years, community groups have collaborated with scientist activists and won seminal legal battles and out-of-court settlements, initiatives to protect their health from toxic emissions; and it prompts consideration on the role and potential impact of social documentary by placing these current stories in dialogue with, and in contrast to, Robert Flaherty’s 1948 Louisiana Story. Distribution funds will support re-staging the installation in order to reach additional public audiences.

ecoarttech (Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir), Indeterminate Hikes

Indeterminate Hikes (IH) is an Android app that transforms everyday landscapes into sites of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings. Generally devices of rapid communication and consumerism, smartphones are re-appropriated by IH as tools of environmental imagination and meditative wonder, renewing awareness of intertwining biological, cultural, and media ecologies and slowing us down at the same time. Distribution funds will support expanded platforms for IH (iPhone, etc.) as well as the production of promotional materials.

Sabisha Friedberg, The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within a Sphere

The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within a Sphere is a sonic poem for radio that combines elements of sound art, radio theater, film, and music to examine themes of transmutation and redemption. The work is based upon a text written in the 19th Century by an anonymous author and chronicles the journey of a fallen initiate of a unnamed secret society. Starry Garter updates traditional radio theater by emphasizing an experimental sound score of atomized dialogue, electro-acoustic composition, and interludes of abstracted cello, piano, and chorus in a multi-channel spatialized format combined with minimalist cinematographic scenography. The Starry Garter is conceived for both live audience and radio broadcast. Funding will support the distribution of the work via radio broadcast, the web, and an adjunct live recording with cast and instrumentation.

Michael Galinsky, Battle for Brooklyn

The documentary film, Battle for Brooklyn, follows the story of reluctant activist Daniel Goldstein as he struggles to save his home and community from being demolished to make way for an arena and real estate development. Over the course of seven years, Daniel spearheads the movement against the development plan as he and the community fight tenaciously in the courts, the streets, and the media to stop the abuse of eminent domain and reveal the corruption at the heart of the plan. Distribution funds will support a series of community, school, and college screenings as well as for public relations efforts on behalf of the film.

Jacqueline Goss, The Observers

In Goss’s film, The Observers, the land and sky of Mt. Washington, New Hampshire form a varying frame for two climatologists as they go about the solitary and steadfast work of measuring and recording the weather. Based in part on the Nathaniel Hawthorne story "The Great Carbuncle," the film features the extreme and surprising beauty of the windiest mountain in the world. Distribution funds will support the production of a home-use release of the film on DVD.

David Horvitz, Public Access

Public Access, originally exhibited at SF Camerawork in San Francisco, California, was a project in which Horvitz drove up the entire California coast and made photographs for the Wikipedia pages of various California beaches. In each photograph, Horvitz's body was subtly (and sometimes obviously) placed in the landscape. As the photographs went online, many Wikipedia editors caught on, and began to debate the legitimacy of the images' usage on the articles. The exhibition documented the project in all aspects: the trip, the photographs, and the commotion caused by the photographs as they entered the web 2.0 sphere. Funds will support the distribution of this new media project vis-à-vis a physical printing of the Public Access images and documentation of the project’s narrative.

Marina Rosenfeld, roygbiv&b

Created for the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of a series exploring the legacy of Fluxus, roygbiv&b is a musical performance, within a mutli-channel sound installation, exploring the intersection of forms implied by the iconic idea of the rainbow. The work aimed to produce a spectral field vertically within the museum's large central atrium space, locating bass players and subwoofers on the ground level and strata of choirs, loudspeakers and instruments rising to the top balcony, and to graphically evoke the iconic curve of the rainbow within this field by virtually spraying arcs of song fragments and other sound over the site's nominally "blank" fourth wall, which is cantilevered out over the atrium's central cavity. Distribution support will be used to capture the three-dimensionality of the sound field the work created in ambisonic and binaural versions for gallery display and archival purposes, as well as to create a web-based documentation of the project.

The 2012 Distribution Grant for New York State Artists is a regrant program made possible with public funds from the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.